Suspected Nazi War Criminal to be Extradited

Newspapers around the world are reporting that suspected Nazi war criminal, Charles Zentai, has lost his battle to avoid extradition from Australia. He will be repatriated to Hungary to face charges that in 1944 he beat 18 year old Peter Balazs to death for refusing to wear a Jewish yellow star.

Zentai, like Nazi war criminals before him and mindless patriots of every nation today, will most certainly defend himself on grounds that he was only following orders.

Hannah Arendt provided a chilling analysis of the kind of evil that is perpetrated by "nobodies" in her book on Responsibility and Judgment:

The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders.

To put it another way: the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons. Within the conceptual framework of these considerations we could say that wrongdoers who refuse to think by themselves what they are doing and who also refuse in retrospect to think about it, that is, go back and remember what they did (which is teshuvah or repentance), have actually failed to constitute themselves into somebodies. By stubbornly remaining nobodies they prove themselves unfit for intercourse with others who, good, bad, or indifferent, are at the very least persons.

Unity or Integrity?

A week ago, David Gushee wrote an essay bemoaning the absence of Southern Baptists from the Baptist World Alliance. He chided "a generation of wounded "exes" for "their public airing of the hurt and anger that resulted from the SBC controversy" and called on "wounded ex-Southern Baptists to renounce SBC bashing, and to seek the Spirit's power to forgive."

What David Gushee doesn't realize is that forgiving Southern Baptists for leaving the Baptist World Alliance is relatively easy for many of us. We are constantly praying "father forgive them, they know not what they do." We don't seek the Spirit's power to forgive them, we seek it to forgive the myopia of those, like Gushee, who insist that unity is more important to Baptists than moral integrity.

Southern Baptist churches are full of people who know that the fundamentalists controlling their Convention have treated God's servants unjustly, have infused secular politics within their churches, and have shattered world peace by championing unjust, preventive wars. Like Gushee, they think unity is more important than integrity. They are quick to forgive unrepentant offenders for injuries caused to others and tireless in their efforts to silence the outcry and protest of those who are injured. For nearly forty years now, their self-righteous piety has been like a glove protecting and concealing the brass-knuckled fist of the neighborhood bully who takes delight in beating senseless anyone who gets in his way.

Unity on Southern Baptist terms, and those are the only terms by which unity can be achieved, is the last thing that the world needs today. Southern Baptists have completely undermined the integrity of the Baptist witness in the eyes of the world.

More than anything else, the world needs to hear that all Baptists are not like Southern Baptists. They need to know that all Baptists are not champions for a violent clash between Christian and Islamic civilizations. They need to know that all Baptists are not advocates for unjust, pre-emptive wars. They need to know that all Baptists do not condone torture and brutal interrogations. They need to know that all Baptists do not support secret renditions and indefinite imprisonment without opportunity for adjudication. They need to know that some Baptists put their loyalty to Christ and his Kingdom high above any patriotic allegiance to their flawed and fallible nations.

Today, there is no way to maintain moral integrity as a Baptist without distinguishing yourself from Southern Baptists. That may look like "SBC bashing" to some. To others, it looks like an apology to the world on behalf of Baptists and a call for all Christians to repent.

On Conscience and Dissent

Thanks to Robert Cunningham for calling my attention to Sean the Baptist's blog about Bill Leonard's presentation at IBTS last month.

Kudos to Sean for giving us a summary of the speech and discussion about this very important and timely topic. Here's a quote from Sean:

It was good lecture, lively and not too long, and it generated signficant discussion. The main concern expressed was whether Leonard's presentation emphasized the individual conscience to the detriment of the communal conscience and thereby inevitably generated schism. For those in the room of more catholic sensibilities there was some concern over the idea that Baptist identity was too closely identified with notions of individual freedom, not least because this leads to the downplaying of central ecclesiological ideas such as covenant etc. I was also acutely aware that Dr Leonard's take on all this is shaped by the context of current debates amongst Baptists in North America.

Fred Shuttlesworth's Courage

Video of the Whitsitt Society presenting civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth its Courage and Freedom award. The award was presented on June 19, 2008 at the meeting of the Whitsitt Society in Memphis, TN.

After a brief exerpt from a video (the sound is bad, but the video is clear), Shuttlesworth's biographer, Andrew Manis (pictured above), speaks (sound is good) before former Mercer University president Kirby Godsey presents the award.

On Myopic Letters from Young CBFers

Associated Baptist Press reports that a group of young CBFers are challenging Cecil Sherman for recounting the history of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

While Sherman's analogy to the holocaust is surely over the top, his concern to recount the story of the fundamentalist takeover is not.

From the beginning of the CBF movement there have been pious voices telling us that we need to move on, forgive and forget, and be more positive and proactive in our spirituality. Every fundamentalist assault upon the integrity and well being of Baptist educators, administrators, missionaries, ministers and lay persons has been greeted with the same mantra to "move on," "get over it," and "face the future."

Unfortunately, most Baptists both within CBF and within the SBC took that advice. That was myopic. Nothing could stir Baptists from our pious apathy. Not the firing of educators, not the seizure, pilfering and mismanagement of Baptist institutions, not the formation of creeds and the administration of loyalty oaths, not the termination of scores of missionaries, and not the union of denomination and right-wing politics. No outrage has been sufficient to create a spine for sustained dissent within the Baptist body.

I'll always be convinced that Baptist apathy -- both within CBF and the SBC -- created a favorable climate for misguided foreign policies that the entire world will be facing for the foreseeable future.

While every mainline denomination in America opposed the doctrine of pre-emptive wars, SBC ethicist Richard Land was writing rationales for war with Iraq. While religious leaders around the world have been working to defuse tensions between religions, Southern Baptists have been leading cheers for a clash of civilizations. When all people of good will have been clamoring for an end to secret arrests, renditions, and torture, Southern Baptist leaders have been offering justications for tactics previously associated only with authoritarian regimes. While scores of scientists insist that we are running out of time to reduce greenhouse gases, Southern Baptists insist there's no grounds for concern.

The world will never know how different history might have been if more Baptists had the boldness, outspokenness, and dogged persistence in confronting injustice that characterizes Cecil Sherman.